Dependency

One upon a time, I kept the sites I liked to visit in my bookmarks. So when I was not on my PC, it was traumatic, because I couldn’t remember where I wanted to go.

Once I had a blog, things were much easier. I could simply build a blogroll there, and huzzah. But that was painful to maintain and keep up-to-date.

Aha! Along came blogrolling.com, which not only automated the blogrolling experience (sort of), but went out and checked to see if the blog had been updated! Whoa, mama! Fabulous! Glitchy, but fabulous.

So now it was a trauma when blogrolling.com was down, since the sites no longer showed up on my blog. The horror. And going back to a “flat” blogroll? Out of the question — it would be like cutting off a hand.

In the last few months, though, I’ve become addicted to a program called Jaeger. It’s an aggregator/syndicator, but it goes beyond “simple” RSS and Atom feeds to offer alternative ways (Syndic8, and simply going out and checking content) to see what’s been updated. Far more reliable, in that way, than blogrolling.com, and a lot easier to add things in or taking things out.

And then — the trauma started all over. Ran into a software glitch (corrupted file) in Jaeger, and, boom, the system wouldn’t start. I thought it was a Firefox problem, but, regardless, I was without my favorite utility. Sure, I still had my blogrolling.com blogroll — but now that was like cutting off a hand — lots of feeds weren’t there, it was glitchy and unreliable, and I couldn’t see in advance what it was I was going to be going to.

Yeesh.

The Jaeger folks got me fixed up last evening, and things are back to normal. But it’s kind of amusing how dependent one gets on a tool, and how at-a-loss one feels when it’s gone.

To that end, I think I’m going to start documenting here (again) some of the more major programs and tools I use, both for my own record (in case my machine should die again) and in hope that you, too, might get addicted.

I just like to share the love, you know …